I follow a wonderfully-named blog called "lathophobic aphasia" http://giaklamata.blogspot.com/
by a chap with a lot of EFL under his belt and an excellent take on the joys and sorrows of the English teacher's life. He's been talking recently about "learner English" aka comic learner errors, a subject beloved of all EFLers.
As it happens I've been marking and reviewing writing exams. Here are a few of the delights I've stumbled upon (the topic was whether old people should be cared for by their families or in special homes).
I think tace car for the old People it well be like wine you take care for your sealdrenor your babey.
Thay need more care for food ho thiy eat and take abath and sleap also and if thay sike not soud yo bo you well thake him far the housebetal.
In my opening the beast please to be old people fine is home with family.
Another thing meny some of the people desn’t like niers, you wan’t help you one in you family.
I conclusion I hop every one to do what the beast for old people in my opeining everyone do this with any pearse.
Alson, the children meby bess in oyr live our withe them family so the will not tok care with bernts.
Meade the havi some desses and the should get madecen but the forget takeit then they will be very secia and ne one the new.
And I listen all people put the old man in the sameplaces.
Some people now put your mother and father of you old people on the special hospital and no need old people on your house.
In conctusion…
The interesting thing to note is that it's usually pretty clear what they are trying to say - in fact, if you read it aloud and allow for L1 interference (my students are Gulf Arabic speakers) and pronunciation confusions (p/b for instance), indifference to vowels in spelling, plus inadequate spacing between words, you can understand almost everything here - though I drew a blank on part of the second sentence - soud is presumable should, but yo bo I do' 'no'.
So the students are, in spite of appearences, getting somewhere. The problems are
a) knowing where to start in helping them
b) overcoming the horrors that the "surface errors" inspire in any teacher and most native speakers.
Anyway, reading these scripts made me feel fairly secia, but I try not to get mad(ecen). Definitely not soud yo bo, bro!
In conctusion, (but certainly not in my opening) I’m going home.
It’s the beast place for me.
I’ll check there are no old people on my house, especially not the mother and father of you old people, who must be ancient.
I’m planning to do something tonight that will be like wine.
A LOT like wine.
Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assessment. Show all posts
Monday, 10 May 2010
Monday, 28 December 2009
Gruesome
I grew up a Roman Catholic, in a London parish attached to Ealing Abbey, a Benedictine foundation. The Abbey also runs a school, run and taught by monks and lay teachers, where all 3 of my brothers went, and where my father taught History, Classics and advised on careers.
In recent years one of the monks (a former head of the junior school) was accused of sexually abusing boys, suspended from serving, and investigated by the police. Dom David Pearce was found guilty and jailed for 8 years. The Charity Commission has investigated and criticised the Abbey for its handling of the case - you can find the report here:
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/investigations/inquiryreports/benedicts.asp
I remember Father David well - and remember that my brothers and their friends disliked him greatly. Perhaps now I have some idea why that was!
What makes it more appalling and baffling is that he continued to abuse after he was suspended and under police investigation. I can't imagine what he was thinking (was he mad? was he addicted? did he think he was immune?)
It also seems pretty clear that the Abbey did not do enough to protect young people in their care, and that they need to sort themselves out. The Abbot apparently apologised during Mass to the parishioners, but I wonder whether lessons have actually been learned.
A personal sideline on the story - and a terrible warning, if you like - is that David Pearce had himself been a pupil at St Benedicts. He left the 6th Form intending to become a dentist, but my father, who was his careers advisor, made the following note about him: "priest?"
For years after my father's death, my mother mentioned that as an example of my Dad's wonderful insight....
Arrghhhh!
Of course if Pearce had gone on to become a dentist and abused young lads from that position of trust, the profession of dentistry would have been horribly tarnished instead.
In recent years one of the monks (a former head of the junior school) was accused of sexually abusing boys, suspended from serving, and investigated by the police. Dom David Pearce was found guilty and jailed for 8 years. The Charity Commission has investigated and criticised the Abbey for its handling of the case - you can find the report here:
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/investigations/inquiryreports/benedicts.asp
I remember Father David well - and remember that my brothers and their friends disliked him greatly. Perhaps now I have some idea why that was!
What makes it more appalling and baffling is that he continued to abuse after he was suspended and under police investigation. I can't imagine what he was thinking (was he mad? was he addicted? did he think he was immune?)
It also seems pretty clear that the Abbey did not do enough to protect young people in their care, and that they need to sort themselves out. The Abbot apparently apologised during Mass to the parishioners, but I wonder whether lessons have actually been learned.
A personal sideline on the story - and a terrible warning, if you like - is that David Pearce had himself been a pupil at St Benedicts. He left the 6th Form intending to become a dentist, but my father, who was his careers advisor, made the following note about him: "priest?"
For years after my father's death, my mother mentioned that as an example of my Dad's wonderful insight....
Arrghhhh!
Of course if Pearce had gone on to become a dentist and abused young lads from that position of trust, the profession of dentistry would have been horribly tarnished instead.
Monday, 1 June 2009
so much to blog, so little time
The pace just gets quicker, with teaching and grading, testing and final presentations all galloping faster and faster to the end of the week. Something in my brain goes dead and I find myself sneaking peeks onto the net...
And answering emails. There has been an email-based debate about teaching vocab here - basically, what when and how.
The background to it is that on the course I teach, a new target is for students to "learn" - which means they must be assessed - on the Academic Word Lists, the top frequency words in Academic writing.
This came in for the first time 2 years ago. So one of my big jobs last year was devising assessments... which we now have a bunch of.
Oddly, the requirement for the course was that students should demonstrate passive understanding of 65% of the list and active production of 60% of the list... I suspect the figures should be rather different for realistic language learning (I'd guess 75% passive recognition - 50% active production would be more likely, though I don't know any research on the figures).
Anyway, devising an instrument that assesses production is quite hard, and the freer the production the harder it is.
There is now the suggestion that some of the AWL should be devolved down onto the level below.
However, the problem I notice most is not with students learning an academic word list (they are good at "learning" - in the sense of "memorising the translation of" lists of words). It is with the more basic vocabulary - what is often called the basic 3,000 words.
Plus they suffer difficulties with forming sentences and word forms (as in history - historical - historian) - it seems hard for students to recognise what a plausible sentence of English looks like, even into their 2nd year. Obviously, this affects their writing, but it also affects their reading.
A lot of exam reading comprehension consists of recognising parallel expressions (so in a text which mentions "eyesight" the question might ask about "vision") - one expression might contain the Academic list word but the other will use a paraphrase.
Students sometimes say "I know what this means in Arabic" but being unable to find other English words is a barrier (and it also encourages students to plagiarise... another can of worms).
Personally, I think that more lists would be pretty deadly - another move, as if we needed more, towards the "memorise-test-forget" cycle a lot of our teaching seems to aim to emulate. I would like more reading - more extensive reading and more focused reading with vocab support. But it's harder to measure the benefits of that.
I even proposed a test - some students in Foundations doing the AWL earlier, and some doing extensive reading with vocab support - then see who does better in the AWL in Year 1, and in everything else.
I'd be willing to bet money the readers would not only learn the AWL's better, but score better in reading and writing....
And answering emails. There has been an email-based debate about teaching vocab here - basically, what when and how.
The background to it is that on the course I teach, a new target is for students to "learn" - which means they must be assessed - on the Academic Word Lists, the top frequency words in Academic writing.
This came in for the first time 2 years ago. So one of my big jobs last year was devising assessments... which we now have a bunch of.
Oddly, the requirement for the course was that students should demonstrate passive understanding of 65% of the list and active production of 60% of the list... I suspect the figures should be rather different for realistic language learning (I'd guess 75% passive recognition - 50% active production would be more likely, though I don't know any research on the figures).
Anyway, devising an instrument that assesses production is quite hard, and the freer the production the harder it is.
There is now the suggestion that some of the AWL should be devolved down onto the level below.
However, the problem I notice most is not with students learning an academic word list (they are good at "learning" - in the sense of "memorising the translation of" lists of words). It is with the more basic vocabulary - what is often called the basic 3,000 words.
Plus they suffer difficulties with forming sentences and word forms (as in history - historical - historian) - it seems hard for students to recognise what a plausible sentence of English looks like, even into their 2nd year. Obviously, this affects their writing, but it also affects their reading.
A lot of exam reading comprehension consists of recognising parallel expressions (so in a text which mentions "eyesight" the question might ask about "vision") - one expression might contain the Academic list word but the other will use a paraphrase.
Students sometimes say "I know what this means in Arabic" but being unable to find other English words is a barrier (and it also encourages students to plagiarise... another can of worms).
Personally, I think that more lists would be pretty deadly - another move, as if we needed more, towards the "memorise-test-forget" cycle a lot of our teaching seems to aim to emulate. I would like more reading - more extensive reading and more focused reading with vocab support. But it's harder to measure the benefits of that.
I even proposed a test - some students in Foundations doing the AWL earlier, and some doing extensive reading with vocab support - then see who does better in the AWL in Year 1, and in everything else.
I'd be willing to bet money the readers would not only learn the AWL's better, but score better in reading and writing....
Monday, 20 April 2009
Turn-up for the books
"No Miss. I don't deserve it."
I've never had a student argue for a lower mark before, but it happened today.
The student's reason was not having done as well as expected (as expected by both of us, frankly) in this assessment.
I thought the mark I gave was fair (well, naturally I would think that) and, true, it would have been good for some students but was rather disappointing for this one, who is normally excellent.
It's an odd reaction, but it reminds me of going into my university exam in Anglo Saxon thinking that I hadn't prepared hard enough and really deserved to fail (actually I did OK - not great, but OK). But part of me felt I deserved to do much much worse.
Seems to me there are two issues here. One is the basic feeling that performance and result, or effort and result, should match up, which most teachers (and students) would agree is a Good Thing generally.
Now, while performance should match result (in a sense the performance is the result) it isn't necessarily true that effort matches result. I have known students who speak virtually like native speaking teenagers but made no attempt to learn anything more since leaving their English-medium high schools, and I have known many students who valiantly struggled to improve from a very low base, and who made it to a high level of achievement.
The other issue is what the criteria for success or failure are.
When I went in to translate some bits of Anglo Saxon poetry my personal criteria was to produce a good English poem which would catch the meaning and some of the spirit of the original. Fat chance: I was nowhere within a million miles of that sort of ability or knowledge - but what I had managed was clearly good enough for the examiners to give me a creditable pass. (I still feel that wasn't good enough, but it may now be too late to go back and try to out-Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney).
My student's criteria for success seems to be, to be able to express her ideas clearly, 100% accurately and (very important to her, this) in a totally original and amusing way.
This, needless to say, is way beyond the exam criteria.
But it is absolutely lovely to have a student who has that kind of approach.
This is the student who called me over during a reading exam and pointed to a sentence in the text. My heart sank, as I was sure she was going to ask me for help - which of course I would have to refuse. Instead she said "Miss, I LIKE this sentence." Two days later she could still recite it by heart.
I've never had a student argue for a lower mark before, but it happened today.
The student's reason was not having done as well as expected (as expected by both of us, frankly) in this assessment.
I thought the mark I gave was fair (well, naturally I would think that) and, true, it would have been good for some students but was rather disappointing for this one, who is normally excellent.
It's an odd reaction, but it reminds me of going into my university exam in Anglo Saxon thinking that I hadn't prepared hard enough and really deserved to fail (actually I did OK - not great, but OK). But part of me felt I deserved to do much much worse.
Seems to me there are two issues here. One is the basic feeling that performance and result, or effort and result, should match up, which most teachers (and students) would agree is a Good Thing generally.
Now, while performance should match result (in a sense the performance is the result) it isn't necessarily true that effort matches result. I have known students who speak virtually like native speaking teenagers but made no attempt to learn anything more since leaving their English-medium high schools, and I have known many students who valiantly struggled to improve from a very low base, and who made it to a high level of achievement.
The other issue is what the criteria for success or failure are.
When I went in to translate some bits of Anglo Saxon poetry my personal criteria was to produce a good English poem which would catch the meaning and some of the spirit of the original. Fat chance: I was nowhere within a million miles of that sort of ability or knowledge - but what I had managed was clearly good enough for the examiners to give me a creditable pass. (I still feel that wasn't good enough, but it may now be too late to go back and try to out-Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney).
My student's criteria for success seems to be, to be able to express her ideas clearly, 100% accurately and (very important to her, this) in a totally original and amusing way.
This, needless to say, is way beyond the exam criteria.
But it is absolutely lovely to have a student who has that kind of approach.
This is the student who called me over during a reading exam and pointed to a sentence in the text. My heart sank, as I was sure she was going to ask me for help - which of course I would have to refuse. Instead she said "Miss, I LIKE this sentence." Two days later she could still recite it by heart.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
